Facebook staff detail the fight over CrowdTangle, which notes top-engaging posts, often showing right-wing sources dominating; in April, its team was reassigned
literally 9 or 10 of 10—by conservative media posts. Facebook is unhappy that this makes them look like a right wing echo chamber and are contemplating if and how to reduce transparency https://twitter.com/... Rachel Maddow / @maddow : fascinating read: https://www.nytimes.com/... Evelyn Douek / @evelyndouek : Important story and it sucks (tho not surprising) that facebook is thinking abt further limiting transparency Worth also noting that it wld be great if other platforms cld offer the transparency in the first place (looking at you, YouTube) https://www.nytimes.com/... @ctardaguila : Whhhaaaaaat? Don't touch Crowdtangle! https://twitter.com/... @onekade : The best part of this story is that FB didn't like the top ten lists (which showed fascists dominating shares and likes) because it signaled to advertisers that their user base is old white people. They weren't so concerned about the fascism part, of course. https://twitter.com/... @hkesvani : This week there's been a lot of conversation about why platforms can flag and add warnings to covid related content but not racism and harassment. Part of it, as explained here, is that any meaningful action would distort how the platform works https://www.nytimes.com/... Alistair Coleman / @alistaircoleman : Virtually every big story we and other journalists and academics have published on the rise of anti-vaccine and QAnon content on FB has relied on CrowdTangle for research. Its apparent closure is going to be a massive loss for journalism and transparency https://www.nytimes.com/... Brian Stelter / @brianstelter : Brian Boland, a former VP in charge of partnerships strategy at FB, says “one of the main reasons that I left Facebook is that the most senior leadership in the company does not want to invest in understanding the impact of its core products.” https://www.nytimes.com/... Casey Newton / @caseynewton : Incredible @kevinroose story about how Facebook sidelined and gutted CrowdTangle after he consistently used it to show how conservative outrage-bait got more engagement than other pages https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/... Kevin Roose / @kevinroose : I wrote about the behind-the-scenes fights at Facebook over CrowdTangle, data access, and what happened when a Twitter account showed a side of the platform execs didn't like. https://www.nytimes.com/... Jon Keegan / @jonkeegan : Jukin' the stats. So much good stuff in here @kevinroose https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
New York TimesKevin Roose
Context & Ripple Effects
CrowdTangle has become Facebook's most inconvenient window into itself: as Kevin Roose's engagement-ranking tweets showed in 2020, the tool's leaderboard repeatedly surfaced conservative outlets at the top, and the News Feed team privately dismissed the numbers as misleading. The new reporting details where that friction landed — in April the CrowdTangle team was reassigned under the Integrity organization, and staff say Facebook is weighing whether and how to reduce the tool's openness.
The move extends a decade-long pattern rather than starting a new one: the 2016 controversies over human-curated Trending Topics, where contractors described outlet preferences and management chaos (per former curators, later defended by employees as personal judgment rather than institutional bias), established that Facebook's visibility instruments are politically sensitive. It also lands amid broader internal unrest, including employee discontent over content takedowns in India and Israel.
First-order effects
Researchers, journalists, and fact-checkers who rely on CrowdTangle face a narrower tool or reduced access if Facebook proceeds with limiting it, since the company controls both the data and who may see it.
The Integrity team now owns the instrument most likely to generate headlines Facebook dislikes, aligning the measurement function with the division responsible for content decisions.
Second-order effects
Other platforms come under sharper contrast pressure: Evelyn Douek's point that YouTube offers no comparable engagement-transparency tool at all becomes harder for rivals to ignore if Facebook retreats from the one that exists.
Fact-checkers and election researchers lose their main shared baseline for measuring what actually spreads on Facebook, pushing them toward less complete proxies and making claims about platform bias harder to verify independently.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds — Trending Topics curated away, engagement data disputed internally, CrowdTangle reassigned — platform transparency becomes a concession platforms grant rather than a capability they guarantee, strengthening the case for regulators or third parties demanding independent access to reach data.
The structural lesson for accountability research is that any measurement regime hosted inside the platform it measures can be reorganized or revoked by the platform, an information-access conflict baked into the infrastructure itself.
The trend: Platform transparency is increasingly subordinate to reputational control, with Facebook's own measurement tools — from Trending Topics to CrowdTangle — successively narrowed when their findings became politically costly.
Brian Boland, a former VP in charge of partnerships strategy at FB, says “one of the main reasons that I left Facebook is that the most senior leadership in the company does not want to invest in understanding the impact of its core products.” https://www.nytimes.com/...
It's not surprising that there are Facebook execs who don't like CrowdTangle, one of the only tools that brings a modicum of transparency to engagement metrics on an otherwise opaque platform, but it's fascinating to read about it @kevinroose https://www.nytimes.com/...
In his first interview since departing, @brianboland tells @kevinroose that Facebook “would love full transparency if there was a guarantee of positive stories & outcomes. But when transparency creates uncomfortable moments, their reaction is often to shut down the transparency.”
Most chaotic thing I've read about FB in long time. Journalists have been told over & over that Crowdtangle data is misleading because doesn't show reach. To read that reach metrics may have showed same patterns internally feels problematic, via @NYTimes https://www.nytimes.com/.…
“... Facebook's executives were more worried about fixing the perception that Facebook was amplifying harmful content than figuring out whether it actually was amplifying harmful content.” https://www.nytimes.com/...
You may not understand why this @kevinroose piece is a big deal. Think of every big story about disinfo you've read in the last few years. Most all relied on CrowdTangle in some way. Now it seems like Facebook wants to cut off that transparency. https://www.nytimes.com/...
Incredible @kevinroose story about how Facebook sidelined and gutted CrowdTangle after he consistently used it to show how conservative outrage-bait got more engagement than other pages https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/...
I wrote about the behind-the-scenes fights at Facebook over CrowdTangle, data access, and what happened when a Twitter account showed a side of the platform execs didn't like. https://www.nytimes.com/...
All of this is even funnier when you consider Facebook *bought* CrowdTangle and spent tons of effort trying to get media people to use it so we'd make more stuff that would trend on Facebook https://www.nytimes.com/...
“the tool fell out of favor with influential Facebook executives around the time of last year's presidential election, when journalists and researchers used it to show that pro-Trump commentators were spreading misinformation and hyperpartisan commentary with stunning success.” h…
Piggybacking off of this very good story to say that @themarkup has actively been tracking the feeds of 1,200 Facebook users to gather data about what they see on the platform and those findings are updated on a daily basis here: https://themarkup.org/... https://twitter.com/...
Something implicit to this (excellent) story from @kevinroose is that we can't trust the private sector to reliably output trustworthy information about its own products - rather, external tools that monitor these platforms seem like a necessity for accountability. https://twitte…
Facebook acquired the independent analytics service CrowdTangle and has now gutted it after the data showed that Facebook was amplifying far-right media sources https://www.nytimes.com/...
FB has used control of their data to control what research can be done. That has come with more and more limitations and requirements, even as it dries up. It's pretty clear they believe that can effectively manage/sculpt the entire spectrum of “independent” research on FB https:…
Not a surprise that Facebook's solution to their content problem would be to hide the data since reality is inconvenient for them. https://gizmodo.com/...
I can't stop with this. Imagine being a Facebook exec. There's a tool that allows the public to see a sliver under the hood, enough to explain and unearth threats to real people and democracy. And you wanna kill it. Because 1 reporter made a top ten list that makes you look bad. …
“Facebook would love full transparency if there was a guarantee of positive stories and outcomes,” Mr. Boland said. “But when transparency creates uncomfortable moments, their reaction is often to shut down the transparency.” Excellent story here. https://twitter.com/...
“CrowdTangle's data made this echo chamber easier for outsiders to see and quantify. But it didn't create it, or give it the tools it needed to grow — Facebook did — and blaming a data tool for these revelations makes no more sense than blaming a thermometer for bad weather.” htt…
As someone who occasionally uses CrowdTangle for research purposes, the prospect of Facebook curtailing or eliminating access to these data is very troubling. https://twitter.com/...
no silver bullets but seems a good one is requiring anonymized data disclosures to public researchers (for platforms above a certain size) so that there can be real assessments of algorithmic amplification. https://twitter.com/...
If you follow @FacebooksTop10, you know that the Top 10 Engagement list every day is dominated—literally 9 or 10 of 10—by conservative media posts. Facebook is unhappy that this makes them look like a right wing echo chamber and are contemplating if and how to reduce transparency…
When official ideology conflicts with self-interest, organizations reveal their true character. When labor unrest arose in the Eastern Bloc [e.g. Solidarity, 1953 East Germany, etc.], the Party suppressed it. Similarly, FB values openness and transparency... until it doesn't. htt…
Important story and it sucks (tho not surprising) that facebook is thinking abt further limiting transparency Worth also noting that it wld be great if other platforms cld offer the transparency in the first place (looking at you, YouTube) https://www.nytimes.com/...
The best part of this story is that FB didn't like the top ten lists (which showed fascists dominating shares and likes) because it signaled to advertisers that their user base is old white people. They weren't so concerned about the fascism part, of course. https://twitter.com/.…
This week there's been a lot of conversation about why platforms can flag and add warnings to covid related content but not racism and harassment. Part of it, as explained here, is that any meaningful action would distort how the platform works https://www.nytimes.com/...
Virtually every big story we and other journalists and academics have published on the rise of anti-vaccine and QAnon content on FB has relied on CrowdTangle for research. Its apparent closure is going to be a massive loss for journalism and transparency https://www.nytimes.com/.…
The top-performing link posts by U.S. Facebook pages in the last 24 hours are from: 1. ForAmerica 2. Taunton Daily Gazette 3. Ben Shapiro 4. Ben Shapiro 5. Sean Hannity 6. Nelly 7. Ben Shapiro 8. Newsmax 9. Dan Bongino 10. Ben Shapiro
The top-performing link posts by U.S. Facebook pages in the last 24 hours are from: 1. Dan Bongino 2. Ben Shapiro 3. Ben Shapiro 4. Ben Shapiro 5. Dan Bongino 6. Dan Bongino 7. Dan Bongino 8. Ben Shapiro 9. Ben Shapiro 10. Ben Shapiro
I was told in the course of reporting this that a few FB staffers were told to turn on push notifications for my tweets during TopTengate last year, and I would like to formally apologize to those people for being so goddamn boring. https://t.co/hJm4dc3wQV
Facebook gutted its data analytics tool, CrowdTangle, by reassigning dozens of its staff & sidelining its CEO after its data showed incendiary screeds & misleading content from right-wing pages regularly outperform traditional news outlets on the NewsFeed https://gizmodo.com/...